Scotland's Ancient Woodlands
Scotland's Ancient Woodlands The scale of Scotland's great Medieval forest is hinted at by the Victorian writer J.E Harting in his British extinct Animals. “We can scarcely overestimate the wildness that everywhere prevailed,” he wrote, "In the south, a vast forest filled the intervening space between Chillingham and Hamilton, a distance, as the crow flies of about 80 miles, including within it Ettrick and numerous other forests, and further north the great Caledonian wood, known even at Rome, covered the greater part of both the Lowlands and the Highlands, its recesses affording shelter to bears, wolves, wild boars, and wild white cattle." In Medieval times, people travelled inland fearfully. The forests were nature's place, the habitat of the forces of darkness, treacherous to the superstitious. Harting achieved a knee-knocking portrait of a wolf-infested wilderness. "The time of James V... a great part of Ross, Inverness, almost the whole of Cromarty, a